Noir City: Hollywood — The 21st Annual Los Angeles Festival of Film Noir
By Alex Divine Deleon
The Noir City Festival has now come of age and the 21st edition which opened at the venerable Hollywood landmark Egyptian Theatre on Friday, March 29, 2019, will this year display twenty uncut gems on ten consecutive nights running in strict chronological order from ‘Trapped’ (1949) to ‘Cry Tough’ (1959). In essence a cannily selected survey of the Hollywood decade of the fifties from an underbelly angle such as only the Film Noir Foundation has the guts and integrity to reveal. Many of these old pictures have been rescued from oblivion by the cutting edge preservation skills of the UCLA film department.
Think the 1950s were buttoned-down and conservative? Think again.
In the 2019 edition of Noir City: Hollywood you will experience the rush — through a lens, darkly — of a turbulent and transitional time in American history, culture, and cinema. Nothing would ever be the same.
The opener Trapped (1949) is a digitally restored print of a rare Richard Fleischer picture the subject of which is tracking down counterfeiters by dedicated T-man (Treasury Department secret agents) on the streets of Los Angeles. Stars a young Lloyd Bridges with a carefully tended blonde front wave ( à la Alan Ladd) as a hardened ex-con who doesn’t smoke but chews gum instead. In itself rather peculiar when everyone else is casually chain smoking themselves to death.
The requisite femme fatale is striking blonde bombshell Barbara Payton whose tempestuous career and tragic life became a staple of ’50s tabloids. The wonderful vintage cars seen are not “vintage” but the actual handsome postwar models that came out at the time, a time when cars had character, like the ’49 Chrysler with a wraparound grill as wide as The Joker’s Grin. Adding a documentary note we are told twice that the U.S. Treasury Department gave permission to film their actual presses as a nod to bring runaway counterfeiting under control. Loads of skillfully cloned fake 20 dollar bills pave the way to the climactic showdown inside the downtown L.A. Red Car barn where the head counterfeiter and killer beats the chair by electrocuting himself when he accidentally grabs onto a hot wire in the dark. In a way this may be seen as an early precursor to the 1985 thriller To Live and Die in L.A. which launched the career of Willem Dafoe, also as a hard-boiled counterfeiter and killer. Not on DVD!
Other highlights of the week ahead will include one of Joan Crawford’s last starring vehicles, Sudden Fear (1952), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), with a one armed Spencer Tracy confronting a hideously evil Robert Ryan,The Harder They Fall (1956), a corrupt boxing movie notable as Bogart’s last and quoted visually by Godard in Breathless, Touch of Evil, 1958, Orson Welles’ all star Mexican border noir with Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Marlene Dietrich, and Welles himself in one of his fattest roles, the French noir Elevator to the Gallows (1958), Louis Malle’s directorial debut with Jeanne Moreau and Maurice Ronet and a score by Miles Davis, definitely a touch of class in this collection (Watch the fabulous trailer here), and I Want To Live (1958), in which Susan Hayward is sentenced to death and won a Best Actress Oscar for her pains in 1959.
On the weekends the films will be introduced in person by His Excellency, Eddie Miller, the Czar of Noir, whose canny and uncanny presentations are as good or better than the films themselves, alone worth the price of admission. And don’t you forget it, or else …
